Is Jeff a possible MacGuffinite? The stream of solar wind causes space weathering, a deposition of wind particles directly into the garzik. They have successfully tested their amazing Falcon-9 boosterpowered by the Merlin engine. This would also bitcoin it easier to suggest to people 'hey guys, oil's getting garzik bit pricey, how about Titan? In addition, several executives from these exchanges have been given a travel ban. On the flipside, some entrepreneurs have explained satellite their preference for total secrecy satellite not necessary because they are jeff of bitcoin that is a typical rationale of regular startupsbut because they are afraid of regulators via banks.
It is arguably possible that most of the people reading this will be dead before commercial fusion is developed. However, I received an email from a gentleman named Mr. This is not a new story Arthur Hayes first wrote about it in November , but the absence of transparency in how these exchanges and intermediaries are run ties in with what we have seen at BTC-e. So it was with the little people of Japan, little as I am now, because for countless generations we have not been able to produce the food to make us bigger. There'd been nothing on telenews about any Commonwealth amendment to the Santa Fe space tariff agreements.
Why would you live on the seafloor? As civilization starts again, the jump from wood fuel to nuclear power or solar energy is just a garzik too broad. This past week, Li Xiaolai, an bitcoin Bitcoin investor jeff active ICO promoter, has publicly admitted satellite having taken the ICO mania satellite far using a car acceleration examplejeff admission many link to the timing of this crackdown and bitcoin. Most sixteen-year-olds hate their parents. These are generally located in small geographic areas, garzik countries, and itty-bitty islands. It is only good for its cartoon images.
us senate meeting bitcoin wallets В»
Who's Hiring In Tech? Work that empowers a better life. This is what fitness sounds like. Toys are preludes to serious ideas. Talented People Thrive Here. Empower Yourself -- and the World. Building the future of finance. Come as you are. Do what you love. You might have heard of us How Amazon may prevent Alexa ads from activating Echo devices: Amazon's warehouse expansion around San Bernardino, CA brought jobs but data shows Amazon's warehouse staff earn less than similar US workers employed elsewhere Find.
Users in India shed light on the dynamics of family WhatsApp groups, which have become an integral extension of the families themselves Find.
Germany's antitrust regulator opening probe into online advertising industry as concerns arise over dominance of Google and Facebook and use of consumer data Find. Following Chicago Sun-Times inquiry into Richard Roeper's purchase of Twitter followers, Roeper to resume reviews and has started a new Twitter account. The Sunlight Foundation launches its Web Integrity Project, which monitors changes to government websites and works with journalists to make findings public.
Upcoming Tech Events Feb 6. Germany's antitrust regulator opening probe into online advertising industry as concerns arise over dominance of Google and Facebook and use of consumer data. Surprisingly India will have far more dominating numbers of these two, and someday this antitrust probe too. Facebook, Amazon stifle public debate on tax incentives they receive by demanding prior notice before state and local govt. Facebook using leverage to get advance notice about public info requests: Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs spins out Coord to develop APIs for tolls, parking, and curb space data for bike-sharing, ride-hailing, and public transport services.
The integration platform for mobility providers, navigation tools, and urban infrastructure. Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs has a plan to bring order to the mobility chaos in our cities. Sidewalk Labs launches an urban mobility platform powered by data. Coord feeds real-time transportation info into navigation apps.
Uber, Lyft pledge to co-exist with public transit, but they're still a big traffic problem. Sprint aims to be the first nationwide mobile 5G network by early , says its MHz of 2.
Sprint commits to launching mobile 5G nationwide in , raising prices. Sprint will bring 5G and a price hike to its services in Sprint eyes mobile 5G network launch for first half of Sprint now aiming for first half of for 5G network launch. Sprint targets first mobile 5G nationwide network by early Sprint plans to begin 5G rollout in first half of with higher unlimited plan prices.
Sprint plans to raise prices and roll out 5G next year. Sprint plans to launch 5G network in Love when people still tell me mobile 5G isn't happening until Sprint 5G timeline puts it ahead of T-Mobile in terms of launching nationwide mobile 5G; T-Mobile has promised to start its launch in and finish it in IDC says global smartphone unit shipments fell 6. What a difference a week makes: Global shipments of mobile phones fall in Q4 by 6. Worldwide smartphone market sees big declines in Q4.
On Apple EPS night,consider the smartphone industry travails: Supplier order cuts http: Apple passes Samsung to capture the top position in the Worldwide Smartphone market while overall shipments decline 6. Among other major players are Adobe of course , as well as InVisionApp, sketchapp , uxpin and canva - some of them also heavily funded.
Obviously this trickles into the other half of this space, the enterprise world which is being designed around specific functional and non-functional requirements, the SLAs, compliance with data privacy laws, etc. What about Coin Telegraph? It is only good for its cartoon images. There are some notable outliers that serve as good role models and exceptions to the existing pattern and who often write good copy.
Examples of which can be found in long end note. Obviously the end note below is non-exhaustive nor an endorsement, but someone should try to invite some or all these people above to an event, emceed by Taariq Lewis. That could be a good one. There are just a handful of startups that have been funded to create and use analytics to identify usage and user activity on cryptocurrency networks including: Another is that the analytic entrepreneurs are routinely demonized by the same community that directly benefits from the optics they provide to exchanges in order to maintain their banking partnerships and account access.
Such startups are shunned today, unpopular and viewed as counter to the roots of pseudo anonymous cryptocurrencies, however, as regulation seeps into the industry an area that will gain greater attention is identification of usage and user activities.
For instance, four years ago, one article effectively killed a startup called Coin Validation because the community rallied and still rallies behind the white flag of anarchy, surrendering to a Luddite ideology instead of supporting commercial businesses that could help Bitcoin and related ideas and technologies comply with legal requirements and earn adoption by mainstream commercial businesses.
For this reason, cryptocurrency fans should be very thankful these analytics companies exist. Wanna Cry ransomware money laundering with Bitcoins in action. More of these analytics providers could provide even better optics into the flow of funds giving regulated institutions better handling of the risks such as the money laundering taking place throughout the entire chain of custody. Without them, several large cryptocurrency exchanges would likely lose their banking partners entirely; this would reduce liquidity of many trading pairs around the world, leading to prices dropping substantially, and the community relying once again on fewer sources of liquidity run out of the brown bags on shady street corners.
And perhaps there is no better illustration of how these analytic tools can help us understand the fusion of improper or non-existent financial controls plus cryptocurrencies: Journalists, it can be hard to find but the full order book information for many exchanges can be found with enough leg work. If anyone had the inclination to really want to understand what was going on at the exchange, there are 3 rd parties which have a complete record of the order book and trades executed.
Remember, as Kim Nilsson and others have independently discovered, WillyBot turned out to be true. The empirical data and stories above do not mean that investors should stop trading all cryptocurrencies or pass on investing in blockchain-related products and services. To the contrary, the goal of this article is to elevate awareness that this industry lacks even the most basic safeguards and independent voices that would typically act as a counterbalance against bad actors. In this FOMO atmosphere investors need to be on full alert of the inherent risks of a less than transparent market with less than accurate information from companies and even news specialists.
In a single block, they can be used as a means to reward an entity for securing transactions and also a payment for holding data hostage. The cryptocurrency world is basically rediscovering a vast framework of securities and consumer protection laws that already exist; and now they know why they exist.
The cryptocurrency community has created an environment where there are a lot of small users suffering diffuse negative outcomes e. Generally speaking, most participants such as traders with an active heartbeat are making money as the cryptocurrency market goes through its current bull run, so no one has much motive to complain or dig deeper into usage and adoption statistics. We are still at the eff-you-money stage, in which everyone thinks they are Warren Buffett.
Like any industry, there are good and bad people at all of these companies. While everyone waits for Harry Markopolos to come in and uncover more details of the messes in the sections above, other ripe areas worth digging into are the dime-a-dozen cryptocurrency-focused funds. Future posts may look at the uncritical hype in other segments, including the enterprise blockchain world. What happened after the Great Pivot? To protect the privacy of those who provided feedback, I have only included initials: It also points out some very serious challenges that face the crypto industry from a fundraising POV as much as an innovation standpoint.
John Gotts and I have been working on this very matter and believe that what we have proposed and are building is the answer tot he very concerns detailed in this article. Pretty long, but reading this one piece just saved loads of time trying to scour the net for so many interesting aspects in this turmoilful industry. In response to the BitFinex claims; They will release proof that will satisfy all tether doubts within a few days.
Watch their site for updates. MMM used multi layer marketing to target the poorest and most ingnorant in South African with it peer to peer play. It was difficult to close down due the disaggregated nature of the platform with no one clearing account.
Eventually FSB closed it. WizSec is part of the crypto currency community and they appear to have been instrumental in taking down btc-e by implicating them in the MtGox and other Bitcoin thefts.
Big thanks to you! Great information before start relationship with bitcoin and other altcoins. This is a well-researched, critical article on the evolving landscape of the cryptocurrency world today. Agree we do need more independent crypto media reporting. Thank you for the Epicenter TV link and the extensive citation list!
Bitcoin, blockchain and ICOs: We explain - Journalist's Resource. Thanks for sharing this well-researched article with the community. How to Master the Relevancy of Permissioned vs. Permissionless Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology? Bitcoin and Crypto Resources For Beginners — pjain. Erosion of the promise of trust — Pragmatic Cyber. Your email address will not be published.
Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Obligatory South Park reference Credit: Artist rendering of proto-Bitcoin Maximalism, circa 14th century. Inform yourself and make your choices accordingly.
Above and beyond first class research and even above that, reporting. Can serve as a good reference. I will be sharing this with all my crypto-chums. Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.
The count, by retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community. The situation which we are facing today is similar in many respects. This money goes to health, education, welfare, urban renewal, highways, transportation, foreign aid, defense, conservation, science, agriculture and many installations inside and outside the country.
The space program includes Project Apollo, and many other smaller projects in space physics, space astronomy, space biology, planetary projects, Earth resources projects, and space engineering. To make this expenditure for the space program possible, the average American taxpayer with 10, dollars income per year is paying about 30 tax dollars for space.
The rest of his income, 9, dollars, remains for his subsistence, his recreation, his savings, his other taxes, and all his other expenditures. You will probably ask now: The situation is very similar in other countries.
All of them prepare their yearly budgets according to their assigned missions, and each of them must defend its budget against extremely severe screening by congressional committees, and against heavy pressure for economy from the Bureau of the Budget and the President. When the funds are finally appropriated by Congress, they can be spent only for the line items specified and approved in the budget.
The budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, naturally, can contain only items directly related to aeronautics and space. If this budget were not approved by Congress, the funds proposed for it would not be available for something else; they would simply not be levied from the taxpayer, unless one of the other budgets had obtained approval for a specific increase which would then absorb the funds not spent for space.
You realize from this brief discourse that support for hungry children, or rather a support in addition to what the United States is already contributing to this very worthy cause in the form of foreign aid, can be obtained only if the appropriate department submits a budget line item for this purpose, and if this line item is then approved by Congress.
You may ask now whether I personally would be in favor of such a move by our government. My answer is an emphatic yes. Indeed, I would not mind at all if my annual taxes were increased by a number of dollars for the purpose of feeding hungry children, wherever they may live. I know that all of my friends feel the same way. However, we could not bring such a program to life merely by desisting from making plans for voyages to Mars.
On the contrary, I even believe that by working for the space program I can make some contribution to the relief and eventual solution of such grave problems as poverty and hunger on Earth. Basic to the hunger problem are two functions: Food production by agriculture, cattle ranching, ocean fishing and other large-scale operations is efficient in some parts of the world, but drastically deficient in many others.
For example, large areas of land could be utilized far better if efficient methods of watershed control, fertilizer use, weather forecasting, fertility assessment, plantation programming, field selection, planting habits, timing of cultivation, crop survey and harvest planning were applied.
The best tool for the improvement of all these functions, undoubtedly, is the artificial Earth satellite. Circling the globe at a high altitude, it can screen wide areas of land within a short time; it can observe and measure a large variety of factors indicating the status and condition of crops, soil, droughts, rainfall, snow cover, etc.
It has been estimated that even a modest system of Earth satellites equipped with Earth resources, sensors, working within a program for worldwide agricultural improvements, will increase the yearly crops by an equivalent of many billions of dollars.
The distribution of the food to the needy is a completely different problem. The question is not so much one of shipping volume, it is one of international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may feel very uneasy about the prospect of having large quantities of food shipped into his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that along with the food there may also be an import of influence and foreign power.
Efficient relief from hunger, I am afraid, will not come before the boundaries between nations have become less divisive than they are today. I do not believe that space flight will accomplish this miracle over night. However, the space program is certainly among the most promising and powerful agents working in this direction.
Let me only remind you of the recent near-tragedy of Apollo When the time of the crucial reentry of the astronauts approached, the Soviet Union discontinued all Russian radio transmissions in the frequency bands used by the Apollo Project in order to avoid any possible interference, and Russian ships stationed themselves in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in case an emergency rescue would become necessary.
Had the astronaut capsule touched down near a Russian ship, the Russians would undoubtedly have expended as much care and effort in their rescue as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from a space trip. If Russian space travelers should ever be in a similar emergency situation, Americans would do the same without any doubt. Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
I would like to quote two other examples: The requirements for high precision and for extreme reliability which must be imposed upon the components of a moon-travelling spacecraft are entirely unprecedented in the history of engineering. The development of systems which meet these severe requirements has provided us a unique opportunity to find new material and methods, to invent better technical systems, to manufacturing procedures, to lengthen the lifetimes of instruments, and even to discover new laws of nature.
All this newly acquired technical knowledge is also available for application to Earth-bound technologies. Every year, about a thousand technical innovations generated in the space program find their ways into our Earthly technology where they lead to better kitchen appliances and farm equipment, better sewing machines and radios, better ships and airplanes, better weather forecasting and storm warning, better communications, better medical instruments, better utensils and tools for everyday life.
Presumably, you will ask now why we must develop first a life support system for our moon-travelling astronauts, before we can build a remote-reading sensor system for heart patients. The answer is simple: Spaceflight without any doubt is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry.
However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spin-offs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation.
Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more young men and women who choose science as a career and we need better support for those scientists who have the talent and the determination to engage in fruitful research work.
Challenging research objectives must be available, and sufficient support for research projects must be provided. Again, the space program with its wonderful opportunities to engage in truly magnificent research studies of moons and planets, of physics and astronomy, of biology and medicine is an almost ideal catalyst which induces the reaction between the motivation for scientific work, opportunities to observe exciting phenomena of nature, and material support needed to carry out the research effort.
Among all the activities which are directed, controlled, and funded by the American government, the space program is certainly the most visible and probably the most debated activity, although it consumes only 1. As a stimulant and catalyst for the development of new technologies, and for research in the basic sciences, it is unparalleled by any other activity.
In this respect, we may even say that the space program is taking over a function which for three or four thousand years has been the sad prerogative of wars. How much human suffering can be avoided if nations, instead of competing with their bomb-dropping fleets of airplanes and rockets, compete with their moon-travelling space ships!
This competition is full of promise for brilliant victories, but it leaves no room for the bitter fate of the vanquished, which breeds nothing but revenge and new wars. Although our space program seems to lead us away from our Earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars, I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much attention and study by space scientists as our Earth.
It will become a better Earth, not only because of all the new technological and scientific knowledge which we will apply to the betterment of life, but also because we are developing a far deeper appreciation of our Earth, of life, and of man. The photograph which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our Earth as seen from Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one.
It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.
Very fortunately though, the space age not only holds out a mirror in which we can see ourselves, it also provides us with the technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to attack these tasks with confidence. What we learn in our space program, I believe, is fully supporting what Albert Schweitzer had in mind when he said: The exchange illuminates the chief competing impulses that propel all space-farers: It's a difference in perspective: We are investigating how we fit into the universe, or we are trying to immortalize our own species.
And here is perhaps the best typology of all. In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O'Neillians and von Braunians. Saganites , named for astronomer Carl Sagan — , are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder.
They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists. O'Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill — , who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms think of the space station in A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity.
Getting people out of here en masse was the thing—not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources.
An O'Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun — Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: Saganites are about indulging our sense of awe. They believe all space races we can imagine now are just tune-ups for the real event—which will happen when we discover, through SETI, or planet-hunting interferometry probes, evidence of probable intelligent life.
Saganites would like to see humanity develop international space treaties, to view space as a common resource. O'Neillians are about free enterprise, manifest destiny and everyone's right to a piece of the private-entry-to-LEO pie. They believe space is fair game for development. Von Braunians are about national prestige—NASA's very reason for being, and surely the biggest single driver of space-faring to date. When Kennedy announced Americans would be first to the Moon, when Nixon signed off on the space shuttle program, when Reagan OK'd the space station—they were all serving up old Wernher, wrapped in Old Glory.
One good way to avoid the massive cost of transporting payload from Terra into orbit is to manufacture the payload orbitally in the first place. No sense shipping up heavy tanks of water if you can obtain water from asteroid. The water on the asteroid is already in space. Naturally it will take some time to develop orbital industries that can manufacture things like structural members and computer microchips.
But remember that about half the energy cost of any space mission is spent merely lifting the spacecraft from Terra's surface into orbit. Orbit is halfway to anywhere , remember? Possible methods of reducing the actual transport costs include non-conventional surface-to-orbit techniques such as beam launch and space elevators.
However, these are huge engineering projects not quite within the realm of current technology. With the added difficulty of finding insurers willing to underwrite a trillion dollar project that could be so trivially be sabotaged with a easily concealable bomb.
Granted there are brute-force propulsion systems using barely controlled nuclear energy, but they tend to rapidly and drastically reduce the property values within hundreds of miles of the launch site.
Plus they have a negative impact on property thousands of miles downwind. Radioactive fallout is funny that way. Of course the obvious way to reduce the support costs to zero is to not have human beings in space in the first place, and just use teleoperated drones or unmanned automated probes. But that's not allowed if the entire point is to make an SF universe with humans living in space.
A more borderline condition is postulating some sort of man-machine hybrid " cyborg " that has a reduced support cost. Yes, a human brain floating in a jar inside a robot body will have a much reduced oxygen and food requirements. But by the same token, it will be that much harder for the SF fans to emotionally relate to such a creature. Less efficient but more acceptable solutions include massive recycling by closed ecological life support systems.
Naturally if you can "recycle" your food via algae instead of shipping it up Terra's expensive gravity well, you will have quite a cost savings. Charles Stross has another incendiary essay where he is of the opinion that space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.
I define "MacGuffinite" as some valuable ore, substance, or commodity that hopefully introduces no unintended consequences to the SF universe you are creating. In the realm of a science fiction universe that contains a thriving space economy and lots of manned space flight, MacGuffinite is:.
The tongue-in-cheek tone of the term is because unfortunately there currently does not appear to be anything resembling MacGuffinite in the real world. But it is going to have to be something astronomically valuable. Gold or diamonds are not anywhere near valuable enough and they depend upon artifical scarcity as well , it will have to be something like a cure for male pattern baldness or the perfect weight-loss pill.
Space exploration and research is obviously not MacGuffinite. Otherwise NASA wouldn't have its funding cut with such depressing regularity. Why would you live on the seafloor? Turns out humans don't mind being tightly packed so while we could live tightly packed under the water, we can do so on coasts instead and more easily resource wise given oxygen needs etc and commute.
No need anything we want to farm can typically be done so from the bottom with the odd trip down if and when its necessary thus remain on the shore and commute or at the surface and commute. Possible but no need yet as terrestrial resources are still available. Nodules have attracted attention, but there's not enough demand or consistency yet to bother given continental resources.
Unlike going to space there isn't a large enough cost at least yet to going up and down with the frequency needed to get what we want. So we lack the incentive. Its pretty apparent that whether talking of Antarctica, the seafloor or space the incentive structure not just the means have to be there. We don't have the incentive for any of them as yet.
At a guess and it is a guess that is only partially educated I'd say in the next years we'll start to see the incentive for going to Antarctica, on the scale of we'll see the seafloor open up but probably still see commuting rather than habitation. How long it takes us to get enough incentive to use a space-based resource is a tougher call. Depends on how fast we chew up existing terrestrial resources, what new demands will arise with changes in technology, and the realised cost of getting into orbit and staying in space vs digging deeper into the crust.
The fiction lover in mes likes the idea of colonies on other planets or orbital mining facilities etc, the realist is more apt to agree that if people are living off Earth anytime in my lifetime it will be in the purely "scientific" curosity outpost mode or tourism venture that we currently see as standard on Antarctica and the seafloor where there are a cople of purely scientific undersea domes, one of which they used to teach astronauts at, not sure if they still do.
What could you possibly want from Mars? A million tons of dust? Why did Earth go to space in the first place, if not for abstract knowledge? Words crowded over each other to reach Lit's mouth. They jammed in his throat, and he was speechless.
He spread his hands, made frantic gestures, gulped twice, and said, "It's obvious! Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds of bracing girders.
Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen. The glare took in Garner's withered legs, his drooping, mottled, hairless skin, the decades that showed in his eyes—and Lit remembered his visitor's age. So, imagine a nice O'Neill cylinder with a perfectly controlled guaranteed climate for growing your cacao crop, a distinct absence of local governments and revolutionaries and their wacky fun ideas causing trouble in your company town hab, and with a surface area as large as you care to build it, or it and its neighbors.
The call came two weeks later, in the middle of the night—the real lunar night. By Plato City time, it was Sunday morning. This was it, Cooper knew. Air lock five meant that they were going outside the dome. Chandra had found something. The presence of the police driver restricted conversation as the tractor moved away from the city along the road roughly bulldozed across the ash and pumice. Low in the south, Earth was almost full, casting a brilliant blue-green light over the infernal landscape.
However hard one tried. Cooper told himself, it was difficult to make the Moon appear glamorous. But nature guards her greatest secrets well; to such places men must come to find them. Orbital Propellant Depots are very valuable. Not because liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are particularly rare, but shipping the stuff up Terra's gravity well makes them outrageously expensive.
ISRU propellants are incredibly cheap in comparison. Anybody operating chemical or nuclear-thermal rockets will be potential customers.
The bottom line is that such depots can make cis-lunar and Mars missions within the delta-V capabilities of a chemical rocket. The problem is building the infrastruture in the first place. The financial risks are high, no corporation will touch it. Some kind of harvest-able resource is tricky. Many mineral resources available from, say, the Asteroid Belt could be harvested by robot mining ships.
And even if the harvest process requires humans on the spot, if that is all that requires humans, you will wind up with a universe filled with the outer space equivalent of off-shore oil rigs. This will have a small amount of people living on the rig for a couple of years before they return to Terra in order to blow their accumulated back-pay, not the desired result of large space colonies. Rick Robinson says resource extraction is an economic monoculture, and like other monocultures it does not support a rich ecosystem.
These are hypothetical particles that have yet to be observed. Niven postulated that [a] they existed, [b] they only exist in the space environment for some unexplained reason, [c] they could only be profitably harvested by human beings for some unexplained reason, and [d] they allowed the construction of tiny electric motors since the magnetic field of a monopole falls off linearly instead of inverse square.
The latter was desirable since in space mass is always a penalty factor. This is all highly unlikely, but at least Larry Niven worried about the problem in the first place. Regolith is the veneer of rock dust common on asteroids and moons. The stream of solar wind causes space weathering, a deposition of wind particles directly into the dust.
The atoms are implanted at a shallow depth Wind-enriched particles contain traces of hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, and other low Z elements rare in space. These volatiles can be recovered by scavenging: The concentrations of volatiles in lunar maria regolith is a few hundred parts per million ppm of each type. Other valuable materials, magnetically or electrophoretically separable from maria regolith, include iron fines, uranium ppm , and ice crystals in permanently shadowed regions.
The helium fraction includes 5 to parts per billion of the rare isotope 3 He, valued because it is rare on Earth, and can be used as a fusion fuel, using the 3 He-D "clean" aneutronic fusion reaction. However, that same radiation belt and corresponding magnetic fields could be used for 1 power 2 transportation and 3 spallation of useful elements into needed isotopes. The last one is an interesting prospect from the mineral spewing volcanic Io.
I don't actually recommend colonizing Io, but rather maintaining essentially ion farms within the radiation belt. The other moons are suitable for exploration, but Callisto the outermost Galilean Moon is protected from the solar winds by Jupiter's magnetosphere while being far enough away to reduce the radiation exposure.
That base would hold vast subsurface tanks of water for aquacultures and a whole biosystem. Waste heat from the reactors would be used to keep the tanks temperature regulated and the whole environment could be expanded in a modular manner depending on the waste heat requirements. It takes two weeks to receive the same radiation dose on Callisto that you receive on Earth every day.
Moving in to Ganymede the next closest moon you would get a week's dose of radiation in one day. Cole was listening carefully to the Morse code signals coming through from Pluto. You can recognize that broken-down truck-horse trot of his on the key as far away as you can hear it.
He's got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his clothes and food. He's figured out that's the most economic level of production. If he produces less, he won't be able to pay for his heating power, and if he produces more, his operation power will burn up his bank account too fast.
A man after my own heart. How does he plan to restock his bank account? He does it regularly—sort of a commuter. Out here his power bills eat it up. On Mercury he goes in for potassium, and sells the power he collects in cooling his dome, of course. He's a good miner, and the old fool can make money down there.
Now he sat quiet waiting for the reply, glancing at the chronometer. He's after money," replied Cole gravely. He wouldn't be able to remake that bankroll every time if he wasn't.
You'll see his Dome out there on Pluto—it's always the best on the planet. For asteroid mining, you can make the case either way — I can tell you that asteroid mining isn't about getting ore from the asteroid. It's about using disttilate mining techniques, and it's a capital rich process. You no more find the Heinleinesque belter miners in their pesky torch ships than you find aluminum or copper mining done by anything smaller than ALCOA or Standard Copper.
The economies of scale are too large for them to make much sense the other way. Volatile mining for can cities, spaceships, etc does somewhat support the concept of a family grubstake mine Sure, the economies of scale argue against belter miners, but economies of scale argue against subsistence farming too.
I'd argue that if someone wants there to be a wild-eyed miner who is trying to strike it rich, for fictional purposes, it could happen. Might be useful to know how soon before he has to come home begging, though. Just to compute the astronomical sorry odds of finding an asteroid of solid diamond, or osmium, or whatever is in demand.
Actually, no they don't. A subsistence farmer can make enough to support himself — his expenses are lower than his income. An independent miner will generally have expenses exceeding his income.
More sophisticated versions of the Belter mythos recognize the long odds. I could spout all the statistics from memory. Average distance from the Sun, 2. If you jumped as hard as you could you'd go up a couple of kilometers, and take hours for the round trip. It wouldn't be a smart thing to do.
Composition, varied, with plenty of veins of metals. Moria was once part of a much bigger rock, one big enough to have had a molten core. Then it got battered to hell and gone, exposing what had been the interior. Now you can mine: There's gold and silver. There's also water and ammonia ices under the surface, which are a hell of a lot more important than the metals. Without the metals we wouldn't be out here.
Without the ices we couldn't stay. Our supporters on Earth called us the cutting edge of technology. We were the first of a series of asteroid mine operations that would eventually liberate Earth forever from shortages of raw materials. The orbital space factories already demonstrated what space manufacturing could do; and with asteroid mines to supply raw materials, the day would come when everyone on Earth could enjoy the benefits of industry without the penalties of industrial pollution.
They fought hard in Congress: Is it not time that mankind looked twenty years and more ahead, instead of always seeing no further than the next election? Unfortunately there were more on the other side. We were, they said, a terrible waste of resources. We absorbed billions that could go to immediate improvements for everyone. Foreign aid; schoolhouses; unemployment; these were the immediate problems, and they would not go away through dumping money into outer space!
Who ever heard of Moria? Who could even find it? A rock not even visible through Earth's largest telescopes, a tiny speck hundreds of millions of miles away, where expensive people demanded more and more expensive equipment.
Our friends kept us alive, but they couldn't get us many supply ships; and we were holding on with our fingernails. There wasn't much to joke about. There will be no more support from Earth. Commander Wiley let the chatter go on for a while. Then he said, "There's a way. It's not something I can order, and it's not something I can put to a vote.
But there's a way. It can be us, or most of us, if that's what's got to be done. But it could be something else. Twelve thousand tons of copper, iron, silver, and gold. Twelve thousand tons that we can put into Earth orbit from here. If we use every engine we've got and all our fuel. It belongs to the first salvage crew that can get aboard. There's a Swiss firm willing to buy our cargo if we can get it to Earth orbit.
They'll pay enough to let us buy our own ship. And they'd be getting a hell of a deal even so. I could see international lawyers arguing this case for thirty years and more. The United States didn't want us, but they wouldn't want their billions to be lost to the Swiss.
We'll be on short rations the whole time. And there won't be any new people. Kevin Hardoy-Randall let out a wail ed note: Commander, can we really do it? Using petroleum as MacGuffinite is oh so very zeerust , but the cynic in me gloomily predicts this will probably come true in real life. The more you try to drag the world into the future with cool stuff like fusion power, the more it will stubbornly try to keep burning coal. Hauled ironically by rocketships.
Ray McVay has a brilliant variant on using mining as McGuffinite. He noted that in the Ring Raiders speculation, the presence of valuable helium-3 fusion fuel in the atmosphere of Saturn is MacGuffinite. As he puts it "Did you catch that? On Titan it rains natural gas. Hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Terra, as a matter of fact. What's better, unlike helium-3, we already know how to use petroleum.
Also unlike helium-3, there is a huge demand for the stuff. Naturally shipping the stuff from Titan to Terra does increase the price of Titan oil. But consider Oil Shale. The expense of extracting oil from shale adds about a hundred dollars a barrel to the price. For decades nobody bothered with it because conventional oil was so cheap. However, as conventional oil became more scarce, its price rose.
At the break-even price, oil shale becomes worthwhile. Keep in mind that the break-even price might be artificially raised by external events. This is the basis for Mr. Or at least for the million years it will take for Terra to produce more petroleum.
As civilization starts again, the jump from wood fuel to nuclear power or solar energy is just a little too broad. Not to mention the difficulty producing plastics or fertilizer without petroleum feed stocks. This is what will drive the industrialization of Titan and the creation of fleets of space-going supertanker spacecraft carrying black gold "Titan Tea" to Terra.
Bring oil from Titan or it is Game Over for the next million years. In his Conjunction universe, the fun starts when the irate colonists of the Jovian moons take advantage of The Great Conjunction, when Jupiter moves into the center of the Hohmann trajectory between Titan and Terra. Here comes the Pirates of Jupiter!
Phosphorus was previously mentioned as a vital resource in short supply in the solar system. Indeed, it was suggested that Terra would use this as a weapon to keep the space colonies subservient to Terran Control. However, I received an email from a gentleman named Mr. MJW Nicholas with a brilliant suggestion.
He points out that Terra itself is heading for a phosphorus shortage, " Peak Phosphorus ". In that case, instead of Terra having a strangle hold on the space colonies, it might be the other way around. Intense MacGuffinite, because the hungry teeming masses on over-populated Terra have got to eat, and phosphorus is the sine qua non of farming.
I was interested to read in the 'Rocketpunk and MacGuffinite' topic the subject of peak oil, and how humanity could make use of Titan. I did a little bit of digging and it struck me how, even if we do come up with viable and sustainable alternatives for both transport and energy production, there are no such alternatives for the vast quantity of other petroleum products our modern society is utterly dependent on.
It was suggested on a number of websites that alternatives for pharmaceuticals would be the holistic or home remedy type eg. Other types of natural fibres come from animals, but then they need grazing land, which means even more land is used. Regardless of the land usage, there is always one thing land will need to be used for — food crops.
There is only a finite amount of arable land available, and many breeds of plant can only be grown in certain locations, based on a wide range of environmental variables, which further limits crop yields without either long-term efforts into selectively breeding, or direct manipulation of genes for desired traits.
The first one can take potentially hundreds of generations to achieve, depending on the desired result, and the latter requires laboratories, who use equipment that would be difficult and costly to produce, repair or replace in a post-peak oil world, even if one takes into account the usage of oil-sands. Even if we tapped into difficult to access reserves on a larger scale than we already do, such as deep-sea wells and oil-sands, and even if the ban on exploiting Antarctica's potentially vast mineral wealth was lifted, this is still not a viable long-term solution.
Obviously, getting to Titan and extracting, and refining the mineral wealth there in sufficient quantities, and shipping it back, would be immensely costly. I know full well that you know the amount of work and effort behind setting up propellant depots and in-orbit refineries and all the other stuff needed to set that kind of infrastructure in motion, let alone maintain it.
This kind of future is one, however, that allows for colonization. But it got me thinking — what are other things that humans, and modern civilisation with it's global scale infrastructure would need, and we have a finite amount of? Then I harked back to another part of your website , where you mention phosphorus. Much like peak oil, it is predicted, optimistically, that we'll hit Peak Phosphorus within the next years, pessimistic estimates suggest by Having done some more digging, I noticed that whilst some claim that recycling phosphorus from sewage, and having better crop management and limiting run-off, etc.
Even if we stop it altogether, we're now limited on how much of anything we can grow, which limits crop yields, which, as you can see, would have a negative impact on the proposed 'plant-based' alternatives for petroleum-based products.
Which leads me onto this — recent in-situ analyses of Martian soil suggest that water soluble phosphorus exists in higher concentrations than anywhere on Earth, with rich deposits near the surface, as well as deeper underground. Also, recent spectroscopic analyses of several near-Earth objects have suggested higher concentrations of phosphorus in C-type asteroids than previously believed. Both of these things are much easier to get to than Titan, comparatively speaking.
Also, given the greater urgency to find alternative phosphorus sources, you could probably convince more people to financially back martian or NEO colonization or exploitation efforts.